Blergh

Already I am not having fun doing this blog. I have been thinking about doing this post for two days but I just kept coming up with new things to distract my attention away.
But alas it is Wednesday which means that I must get some work done in order to feed myself and junk.

Boo to all that I say, whatever happened to just killing people for stuff?

The exhibition during the weekend went very, very well and I must give some great credit to Brenda the exhibitioner of the event who did a bang up job promoting the show and getting sponsors and all that other exhibitioner junk.

The venue itself was lovely a nice big open space, normally now a lot of new gallery's and halls are new and have the awful pure white modernist look about them.
I for one can't stand that look. Just seems to controlling for my taste.
But this place "Black Loft" was absolutely perfect and for sure I will be using it again in the future if I can as it is really close to where I live and quite near the city centre so it makes it easy for all.

But for now I must get back to work.
I have a meeting with a web designer this weekend to sort out what I want for my website and I guess I have to pay the guy :(
Plus I have to get some Wedding stuff finished by the end of the week in order to send it to the printers in time for the deadline.

God gone are the humdrum days I used to have where I just watched TV.
I used to be cool.

On the plus side all my old friends seem to be getting Fat!
Kieran Broderick +1
That's what happens to stupid people!

Man this blog is very random I didn't even talk about any pictures I took

I took this photo along with a series of model shots over the weekend for a model looking for a decent set of portfolio shots to show agency's.
The image above is my personal fav that I took that day. So much so that I have put it into one of my new business card designs that I have just today finished and hopefully tomorrow I'll send the order through.
Also on that day (Sunday) I learned the greatness of having a make-up artist at a shoot no matter what.
I kept this shoot bare bones and only used one light, granted it was a softbox but still that only counts as one light.
Thanks to the black background the green parts of her outfit and hair really stand out more.
The soft blueish filter is something I applied in the post work stage.

I hope this women appreciates the work I put in.
Who am I kidding they never do!

Cupcakes aint for fools!

I freaking hate working with cupcakes, they must be the most annoying things in the world to shoot.
So last night I was of course worrying about a job I had to get done in order to make some dough because with all the stuff I bought recently I certainly need it.
So like I was trying to say I was up last night baking cupcakes which is surprisingly easy.
What is not so easy is decorating them I must have gone through 15 cupcakes before I gave up and just went out shopping the next day in the search for cupcakes to shoot.

I think I found cupcakes that should do the job perfectly,
(They’re in the image above.)

What is not fun of course is shooting the bloody things which is what I did today at the studio and never before in my life have I found an object/piece of food so difficult to light.

I shot them on some white perspex along with a nice porcelain
candle stand that I had brought from my house, Combined with
the perspex it gave me some a lovely soft look around the edges
of the stand.

Of course I used my all time favorite studio lens for this shoot
my beautiful 50mm f/1.8
Good god I love that lens. With it’s low f-stop I got a nice wide
depth of field onto the subject and thusly only the first cupcake is
slightly in focus where as the rest blur out the further out you go.

(Basic photography here people, I should charge for lessons.)

Of course getting six different interesting shots of these cupcakes
was another trial I had to get through which is why I wasted
three hours inside the studio today just to get this done.

But now that I have it out of the way all I have to do now is to
mount the images onto some foam board and collect my sweet
sweet cash. Of course I also forgot that tomorrow is a bank
holiday so I doubt I will be dropping these off tomorrow.
Nor Collecting cash :(

Also on Friday I have to go the black loft to hang up some of my work for an eexhibtion that is on during this weekend.
I have two set pieces of work on display
The first being a set of some 8x9in images of people whom cloak themselves in fantasy whilst interacting with the real world.
I'm not the best at explaining it but the pictures speak for themselves.
The secod set is some b/w white work i shot of the Dublin Docklands this last November using Medium format.
Come on come all to see the work!!!

Blackest Night

As I sit here actually planning out and making my website that I have been talking about for years,
I still can’t help but slide into my old ways of just giving up and moving onto something else only to abandon that only half done.
But these things must be done and I’m quite surprised how much I’m enjoying it.
Anywho since I’m a Photographer I going to guess what you want to see in this blog is me talking about photoesque stuff and of course what I have shot lately.

*sigh*
I guess I must conform with the masses, I swore I’d never blog! Even when I lived in Japan I never blogged even though every white guy over there does.

Just going through some model head/full body shots I did for a models portfolio, not exactly the glamours life I led but it pays.

Before I made it to the studio I dropped into Chapters on Pearse Street and picked up a fantastic book of B/W portraits by the Photographer Clay Enos, I can’t recommend that book enough fantastic shots. I should really mention what the book is called: Watchmen Portraits. It’s a lovely large hardcover book containing shots of all the actors of the Watchmen movie, even some props are documented in the book.

Back to my story and enough of the micro review, I guess after looking at the book so soon before the shoot it must have influenced me as I started using a white background that was light with two lights at +2 Stops over the exposure of the model without even thinking why.
Then using two lights with spill attachments which in turn used two white umbrella reflectors to give me some soft spread out light.

What I got out using that equipment was of course an insanely over exposed image, BUT!!!! I was planning for that!
Here is the original and of course the edited final piece

Before you even think “that must have taken hours in photoshop”
Nope not at all at most 20 mins, Most of my editing is done in the Camera Raw window that I open from Bridge then the only edits that I ever do in photoshop really is just simple old spot removal, patching, and of course resizing the images plus the addition of a border when printing.

I was quite happy with the days work I did yesterday, not happy with the all nighter I pulled to get them done, I don’t like this whole sleep during the day and work in the night buzz I’m on at the moment.

All the photos from that shoot I have added into the web sites
beta photo section, I have no idea how large I can make
it but I’m also quite lazy in order to go through all my old
photos of the past six/seven years and figure out which to
display.

I’ll get it done by the next blog post I swear!!!

(Never gonna happen)




On non photo based news, the new Scott Pilgram trailer came out and I can’t stop myself from watching it at least once every two hours or so. Now that is the sign of a damn good trailer. Not to sound like a giddy school girl “I sooo can’t wait for this movie and the final book”



Hopefully the next post will be in two days.

Currently Listening to: Prince Ali -Robbin Williams (Aladdin Soundtrack)